Europeana Awareness Event in Brussels

15 May 2012 – On Wednesday, 9 May, a major event for the Ministers of Culture and leaders of Europe’s creative industries and memory organisations took place in Brussels. It was organised by Europeana and the European Commission together with the Danish Presidency. Aim of event was to raise awareness of Europeana among Europe’s citizens and to build support for the ” Connecting Europe Facility” (CEF) infrastructure which will fund Europeana long- term as a core service. Very positive speeches by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, and by the Danish Culture Minister on behalf of the EU Council Presidency, were followed by statements in support of Europeana by Ministers from a dozen countries. All ministers of culture were invited to choose a favourite item in the Europeana portal and present their committment to Europeana. The list of choices and the press release are here: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/9mayministerstreasures The event started with a seminar called “Culture for Innovation-Recommendations for Change” looking at different aspects on open data. The recommendations made by advocates of digital innovation are the following ones:

To invest in digitization & preservation (only 15% of our cultural heritage is digitised so far)

To make copyright work in the digital age

To explore the new business models based on opening up content

To exploit the power of open – data, licences, standards

It was also the opportunity for Neelie Kroes to launch the Hack4Europe 2012, a competition between developers, designers and programmers of five different country to develop their ideas for the creative re-use of Europeana data and to build applications showcasing the social and business value of open cultural data. Around 350 people attended and had the chance to see a short demo of the eCloud, the big screen 3D interactive display of all the material collected as part of the various 1914-1918 initiatives. Some of the most remarkable stories are also featured in the new Europeana 1914-1918 exhibition.